‘Good,' said the fat official. ‘And providing that Moscow can send the correct documentation for the Englishman, down the telephone wire, then I shall let you through!'

‘Dolt!' Krakovitch sneered. ‘You, of course, shall come with me to Siret, where you'll receive your instructions direct from the Kremlin!'

How dearly the other would have loved to tell him that he had already received his instructions from Moscow, but... he'd been warned against that. Instead he slowly shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, Comrade, I cannot leave my post. Dereliction of duty is a very serious matter. Nothing you or anyone else could say could force me from my place of duty.'

Krakovitch saw from the official's red face that he'd pushed him too far. Now he would probably be more stubborn than ever, even to the point of deliberate obstruction.

That was a thought which made Krakovitch frown. For what if all of this trouble had been ‘deliberate obstruction' right from the start? Was that possible? ‘Then the solution is simple,' he said. ‘I assume that Siret does have a twenty-four hour police station — with telephones that work?'

His opponent chewed his lip. ‘Of course,' he finally answered.

‘Then I shall simply telephone ahead to Kolomyya and have a unit of the nearest military force here within the hour. How will it feel, Comrade, to be a Russian, commanded by some Russian army officer to stand aside, while I and my friends are escorted through your stupid little checkpoint? And to know that tomorrow all hell is

going to descend on you, because you will have been the focus of what could well be a serious international incident?'

At which precise moment, out in the field to the west of the road and back a little way towards Siret, Sergei Gulharov stooped and picked up the two uncoupled halves, male and female, of a heavy electrical connection. Taped to the main supply cable was a much thinner telephone wire. Its connection, also broken, was a simple, slender plug-and-socket affair. He connected the telephone cable first, then without pause screwed the heavier couplings together. There came a sputter and crackle of current, a flash of blue sparks, and —The lights came on in the border post. Krakovitch, on the point of leaving to carry out his threat, stopped at the door, turned back and saw the look of confusion on the official's face. ‘I suppose,' Krakovitch said, ‘this means your telephone is also working again?'

‘I... I suppose so,' said the other.

Krakovitch came back to the counter. ‘Which means,' his tone was icy, ‘that from now on we might just start to get somewhere . .

1.00A.M. in Moscow.

At the Château Bronnitsy, some miles out of the city along the Serpukhov Road, Ivan Gerenko and Theo Dolgikh stood at an oval observation port of one-way glass and stared into the room beyond at a scene like something out of a science fiction nightmare.

Inside the ‘operating theatre', Alec Kyle lay unconscious on his back, strapped to a padded table. His head was slightly elevated by means of a rubber cushion, and a bulky stainless-steel helmet covered his head and eyes in a half dome, leaving his nose and mouth free for breathing. Hundreds of hair-fine wires cased in coloured plastic sleeves shimmered like a rainbow from the helmet to a computer where three operators worked frantically, following thought sequences from beginning to end and erasing them at the point of resolution. Inside the helmet, many tiny sensor electrodes had been clamped to Kyle's skull; others, along with batteries of micro-monitors, were secured by tape to his chest, wrists, stomach and throat. Four more men, telepaths, sat paired on each side of Kyle on stainless-steel chairs, scribbling in notebooks in their laps, each with one hand resting lightly on Kyle's naked body. A master telepathist — Zek Foener, E-Branch's best

— sat alone in one corner of the room. Foener was a beautiful young woman in her mid-twenties, an East German recruited by Gregor Borowitz during his last days as head of the branch. She sat with her elbows on her knees, one hand to her brow, utterly motionless, totally intent upon absorbing Kyle's thoughts as quickly as they were stimulated and generated.

Dolgikh was full of morbid fascination. He had arrived with Kyle at the château about 11.00 A.M. Their flight from Bucharest had been made in a military transport aircraft to an airbase in Smolensk, then to the Château in E-Branch's own helicopter. All of this had been achieved in absolute secrecy; KGB cover had been tight as a drum. Not even Brezhnev — especially Brezhnev — knew what was happening here.

At the Château Kyle had been injected with a truth serum — not to loosen his tongue but his mind — which had rendered him unconscious. And for the last twelve hours, with booster shots of the serum at regular intervals, he had been giving up all the secrets of INTESP to the Soviet espers. Theo Dolgikh, however, was a very mundane man. His ideas of interrogation, or ‘truth gathering', were far removed from anything he saw here.

‘What exactly are they doing to him? How does this work, Comrade?' he asked.

Without looking at Dolgikh, with his faded hazel eyes following every slightest movement in the room beyond

the screen, Gerenko answered, ‘You, of all people, have surely heard of brainwashing, Theo? Well, that is what we are doing: washing Alec Kyle's brain. So thoroughly, in fact, that it will come out of the wash bleached!'

Ivan Gerenko was slight, and so small as to be almost childlike in stature; but his wrinkled skin, faded eyes and generally sallow appearance were those of an old man. And yet he was only thirty-seven. A rare disease had stunted him physically, aged him prematurely, and a contrary Nature had made up the deficiency by giving him a supplementary ‘talent'. He was a ‘deflector'.

Like Darcy Clarke in many ways, he was the opposite of accident-prone. But where Clarke's talent avoided danger, Gerenko actually deflected it. A well-aimed blow would not strike him; the shaft of an axe would break before the blade could touch his flesh. The advantage was enormous, immeasurable: he feared nothing and was almost scornful of physical danger. And it accounted for his totally disdainful manner where people such as Theo Dolgikh were concerned. Why should he afford them any sort of respect? They might dislike him, but they could never hurt him. No man was capable of bringing physical harm to Ivan Gerenko.

‘Brainwashing?' Dolgikh repeated him. ‘I had thought some sort of interrogation, surely?'

‘Both,' Gerenko nodded, talking rather to himself than by way of answering Dolgikh. ‘We use science, psychology, parapsychology. The three Ts: technology, terror, telepathy. The drug we've put in his blood stimulates memory. It works by making him feel alone — utterly alone. He feels that no one else exists in all the universe

— even his own existence is in doubt! He wants to ‘talk' about all of his experiences, everything he ever did or saw or said, because that way he will know that he is real, that he has existence. But if he physically tried to do it at the speed his mind is working, he would rapidly dehydrate

and burn himself out; especially if he were awake, conscious. Also, we are not interested in the accumulation of all of that information, we do not wish to know ‘everything'. His life in general holds little of interest to us, but of course we are completely fascinated with details of his work for INTESP.'

Dolgikh shook his head in bewilderment. ‘You are stealing his thoughts?'

‘Oh yes! It's an idea we borrowed from Boris Dragosani. He was a necromancer: he could steal the thoughts of the dead! We can only do it to the living, but when we're finished they're as good as dead...‘

‘But... I mean, how?' The concept was over Dolgikh's head.